5 bags bag wigs in which the hair was enclosed as in an
ornamental bag.
6 crape less expensive than silk.
garters suggesting knights of the garter.
8 hacks hackney carriages, a common mode of
transport.
13 Anne Queen Anne in whose reign the church of St
Mary Le Strand originated.
14 the saints of Drury Lane irony; Drury Lane was
frequented by prostitutes.
15 stationers booksellers.
34 More an insubstantial poet. The name suggests the
Greek for folly.
47 As when a dab-chick a grotesque version of a famous
passage in Milton’s Paradise Lost (II, 947–50)
describing Satan’s progress through Chaos:
...so eagerly the fiend
O’er bog, o’er steep, through strait, rough,
dense, or rare,
With head, hands, wings, or feet, pursues his
way,
And swims, or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or
flies.
54 Corinna the name that the Roman love poet Ovid
gave to his mistress.
57 Here fortuned Curll to slide a grotesque parody of the
heroic foot-race in which Ajax slips upon dung in the
Iliad and Nisus (in Virgil’s adaptation of Homer) slips
on the blood and filth left behind from a sacrifice in
the Aeneid.
59 obscene with filth ‘Though this incident may seem
too low and base for the dignity of an epic poem,
the learned very well know it to be but a copy of
Homer and Virgil; the very words [dung] and
fimus [filth] are used by them, though our poet (in
compliance with modern nicety) has remarkably
enriched and coloured his language as well as raised
his versification in these two episodes.... If we